St. Paul Goes to Spain follows three men bound by their shared faith and curiosity about the apostle Paul, who, after discovering a letter, they go on a journey to the places they think Paul could have visited in Spain. What inspired the setup of your story?

Well, I wrote it as an historian and a Christian, but I was long interested if Paul actually made a missionary trip to Spain which he mentioned in some other published Scripture, such as the Book of Romans. Plus, I have loved fiction ever since early-life discoveries of Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc. It is a way of reaching people and drawing upon your imagination to tell great stories that, in fact, usually reach a lot more people than histories! I did an earlier novel on early Christianity in the Americas (Columbian discoveries, conquests, and settlements) and how Jesus, or, more exactly, some of his followers and prophets may have reached the New World hundreds of years before 1492, and they left evidence (artifacts in the forms of the Cross), and I was off into the past again, this time inventing and tracing a story which I think could have actually happened. Ok, I’ll stop here. I’ve had a couple cups of coffee and it is Saturday morning and football games don’t begin until this afternoon!

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I’ve always enjoyed the trajectory and messages of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, especially since he produced more than half of the Books of the New Testament. He was, in fact, the writer who did more to write down the teachings of Jesus or to create the theology of Christianity. So I suppose my principal interest was in exploring, one, the central themes of Christianity that Paul taught (love, forgiveness, salvation, etc.) and, two, how he probably took them to Spain, a country I have long loved and admired given my background and experiences, first visiting as a young Naval officer in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in the mid-1960s, and then over the years as a historian, where I especially learned about the land and its people while researching for my dissertation in the Archive of the Indies, Seville, 1970-71.

What experience in your life has had the biggest impact on your writing?

Without a doubt, it has been the growth of my Christian faith, influenced especially by my marriage to my wife Louise more than thirty years ago. Without going into detail, she showed me that true worship in understanding did not come necessarily with reading and doing good works, but through the faith that comes when God in his infinite Grace accepts you into his world. You have but to accept. Secondarily, but no less important (although not as transcending as making the same discovery that Martin Luther made in the early sixteenth century when he discovered for himself while teaching at Wittenberg on the Book of Galatians, the true power of the grace of God) was my teaching the history of Christianity over the last almost five decades to various forums, from my students at the University of Alabama to mission trips into places like Honduras and the Dominican Republic, and my all-time favorite students, the prisoners of the Tuscaloosa County Jail where I’ve been ministering on a weekly basis for twenty-five years.

What is one thing that you hope readers take away from St. Paul Goes to Spain?

That the Christian message given to Paul by Jesus (beginning with his Road to Damascus conversion) was indeed aimed to the entire world, albeit a world circumscribed by the knowledge of geography of the world 2000 years ago. Taking it to Spain was just reaching the far Western end of the Mediterranean and I even hint that Paul may have voyaged into the Atlantic with some of the intrepid Phoenician mariners of the times and zipped across the Atlantic, about fifteen hundred years before Columbus!

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